


Rock, And Also Water

by SilverDagger



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: F/F, Ficlet, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 03:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4003306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not so easy, fixing what's been broken, and sometimes freedom still feels out of reach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rock, And Also Water

Toast is restless.

She shouldn't be. The Citadel is a good place now, with earth to plant the Keeper's seeds, cool shade and water pumped from cisterns beneath the earth. But out there it's only dust and dust, and sometimes it's beautiful, but more often she hates it. She doesn't know why, exactly. It's better than a vault beneath the earth, bound in golden chains. Maybe it's just that there's a world beyond the salt, unreachable, and she hates being hemmed in.

Days when she feels like that, she climbs to the upper-level greenhouses where the sun slants in through carved windows, and she looks across endless desert and wide, pale sky, and waits until the feeling passes.

Dag's here too, most days, working the garden beds, up to her elbows in soil. It's her place, more than anyone else's, though she's never begrudged the company. She loves those seedlings of hers, sings them lullabies, cries when one dies. They're as much her children as any human babe, and it's a rare day when Toast doesn't see her with dirt beneath her nails, smeared careless across her face.

Usually, they share the room in silence, but today, when Toast takes up her vigil at the window, Dag rises from her work and comes to stand beside her. Outside, the ground is dry as old bone, and there's not even a shadow on the horizon.

"You wonder about it, don't you," Dag says. "The ones who did this."

"Men," Toast spits, and runs a thumb over the hilt of the knife that Furiosa is teaching her to use. It's a good knife, jagged-edged scrap steel etched with letters from the time before, T-O-S-T, spelling out her name. It's the best thing she owns. She's not sure whether she's hoping for a chance to use it or the chance to never have to, and the answer changes with the day, but when the anger comes boiling up thick and ugly inside her, it's always a man's death she imagines.

"It was," Dag says, "but... I think it was us, too. People. All of us together."

And yeah, Toast can see that. Men aren't the only ones with fear and hate all twisted up inside, and when she thinks about it like that, she has to turn her eyes back to Wasteland.

"I miss Angharad," she says quietly. "She was good. Me? Give me the choice, sometimes I think I might burn the world all over again."

For a while, the only sound is the irradiated wind sweeping in from the high desert and the slow drip of water from deeper in the cave, and everything feels sharp-edged and precarious. Then Dag's hand is soft on her arm, pulling her back around, and she says, "you wouldn't. If you had the choice, you wouldn't want to."

It's a strange jolt, hearing that, dealing the water-rich coolness of Dag's dirt covered skin against her own. For a moment she understands what the War Boys used to feel, whenever that old bag of filth Joe would look in their direction. She might be the one called the Knowing, but it's Dag who always seems to know too much. Got something of the mystic in her, clearer now they've crossed the Waste and returned. None of them wants to admit that they're a little bit in awe of her, even Toast, who doesn't like to be in awe of anyone.

So she doesn't want to ask, because every question is a little more separation between them, but she has to know.

"You think it's the right thing to do, staying here?"

Dag doesn't answer immediately. She looks across the sands with distant eyes, and it aches just seeing her like that, like a vision in a heat mirage, shimmering and unreal. _You used to be my friend,_ she thinks. Now I don't know what you are.

"You know the guzzoline won't last forever," Dag says at last. "Gonna have to build something where we are now."

Toast knows that. And it's a safe place, good a place as any, with water to spare in the air and beneath the surface. Capable won't stop talking about drainage and capture systems, and Furiosa's put the word out that the Citadel trades food for books, long as they got something to do with engineering or the way things work. They've even had some takers, scavenger teams showing up with rigs full of what they see as useless paper. Most of it is useless. Some of it, Capable claims, is treasure.

And sometimes, this good, safe place is still the prison it's always been, and Toast wants the road again, the deafening roar of engines and only the horizon in her eyes. But mostly, there are other things she wants more.

"You think we can bring it back, then? The Green?"

Toast wants her to say yes. Toast wants her to say she's seen it in a dream or read it in the path of satellites, that there's only one road they can take from here and it's a good one. But she ain't stupid and Dag's no liar, and it's no surprise when the answer she gets is, "no. I don't. I think the world's too dead for healing."

But when Toast looks away with a muttered "of course," Dag turns to her and says, "didn't think we could escape, either. Never thought the Citadel would be ours."

But she climbed into the hold of that rig anyway, and she was with them when they turned and rode for home, and every day she's up here with her seeds, watching them grow and live and die. Watching them grow again.

This time, it's Toast who reaches out to offer comfort, a rough embrace, strength and stubbornness the only thing either of them have to give. Ain't neither of them believers, but maybe they don't have to be.

"The past was theirs," she says. "Future's ours for the taking."


End file.
